I've promised the nuns we will bring Tsion back to see them before we leave Ethiopia, and so here we are, walking back into the little room where she has spent the last year of her life, with its wall to wall cribs and its bucket of ragged and aromatic cloth diapers in the corner and the eyes of little ones watching us intently from every corner of the room.

Babies lie on a mat on the floor napping while others play around them, still more stand or sit or sleep in their cribs, and others clutch at my legs begging for contact. The most interesting corner to all seems to be where Sister Veronica, an Ethiopian nun with a radiant smile sits on a chair shoveling cereal into a spindly big-eyed baby's mouth. Children swarm around her knees watching each bite go into the little one's mouth.

As I set my new daughter down to play, she toddles over and joins the crowd around the Sister's knees, and despite the good breakfast she ate an hour ago, she seems to be hoping for more from Sister Veronica. When Sister sees, she throws back her head and laughs and asks a worker to get my Tsion a bowl, and within a minute my little one is sitting up on the counter with a rag around her neck for a bib, opening her mouth baby-bird-wide as bite after bite of cereal goes into her mouth via another smiling Ethiopian lady.

And I think of scarcity and look at the other babies waiting, all of whom are leaner than my chubby little one, and I want to tell the nuns to save the food for someone else, but then I realize this is the last meal my daughter will ever have from these kind and hard-working ladies who've loved her for a year, because tomorrow we get on a plane for America. And so I sit and watch my daughter happily receive bite after bite after bite into her wide-open baby-bird mouth.